Voice biometrics technology continues to advance. Two approaches to voice biometrics technology may be currently available: passive voice biometrics and active voice biometrics. With passive voice biometrics, any speech received from an individual may be converted to a voice print and matched to a previously obtained voice print. With active voice biometrics, a phrase spoken by an individual may be converted to a voice print and matched to a previously obtained voice print corresponding to that phrase. In either case, voice biometrics may indicate whether the individuals associated with the voice prints are the same. In this way, current voice biometrics technology may be employed to authenticate the identity of an individual.
It will be appreciated, however, that these approaches may require the identity—or at least the purported identity—of the individual be determined in order to determine which voice print to select from a pool of voice prints for comparison. It may be tempting to simply compare the speech received from an individual to each voice print in the pool of voice prints. Such an approach, however, is impractical in situations where the pool of voice prints is relatively large. Business entities, for example, may maintain hundreds of thousands of voice prints for their customers in order to perform customer authentication.
As a result, current approaches may require individual to first identify themselves through some other means in order to locate a voice print to compare to speech received from those individuals. For example, current approaches may require an individual to identify themselves by typing in an account number, customer number, or other type of identifier. Individuals may find such approaches time-consuming, cumbersome, and possibly frustrating when such information is not readily available or accessible.
Therefore, a need exists for an approach to voice biometrics that both identifies and authenticates an individual based on the voice of that individual